I am very pleased to hear about some of these new features in Adobe Camera Raw 7 and Photoshop CS6. I think a lot of you will appreciate the c, but watch the video below direct from the product managers to see what they are up to!
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Vin Diesel fan? Well the ladies certainly are and that’s exactly who Top Shelf Entertainment (TSE) are out to please. TSE are the dancing/stripping group from Australia who late last year hired me to shoot their entire arsenal of content for their new website.
Part of their business is doing themed dance/strip shows for various ladies nights and stage shows and this one above is for their Riddick theme.
Ok now onto the photography part. This was obviously a composite of a number of photos. Firstly we have the subject Camille who I photographed on a gray background and extracted out. The second image is the cracked grungey surface which was a stock image. The mountains in the distance were another stock image that I modified quite a bit to suit, and finally the night sky and planets image completed the composite. It’s a fairly simple composite just blending a few seperate images together and colour correcting the whole peice to fit together better.
For Riddick himself, I applied some detail enhancing techniques to get the most out of the image, accompanied with some light dodge and burning.
So I think this is a pretty good result for a fairly simple approach. I had about 12 or so of these to do so I had to keep it as simple as I could.
B.
Jacinta and I have been meaning to work together for a very long time now having known each other from the beginnings of both our careers. So a couple of weeks ago we managed to finally both be in town, and both had a bit of free time, so we made it happen!
I recruited Jacinta to be the new Perth Street Car Magazine feature model which will be in the April issue of the magazine, but on top of that we also had some fun in the pool and got a little creative with gelled speedlights, some smoke and a hose. The photo above is the product of all that. I hope you like it!
THE LIGHTING SETUP:
This particular shot was taken with just 3 lights.
An Elinchrom ‘A’ Head fitted with a 100cm Deep Octa powered by my Elinchrom Ranger RX Speed AS battery pack was my main light. It was positioned front and centre just above the frame of the picture, and about a metre and a half in front of Jacinta.
On the left, level with jacinta was a 430EX Speedlight with an Lumiquest FXtra gel holder and a red gel placed inside. This was set to about 1/8th power. Directly behind Jacinta placed nice and high way out of frame was a Canon 580EXII on about 1/4 power. This 580 had a turquise hel placed over it and was aimed directly down at Jacinta and the water, firing through a beam of water being sprayed by a hose I mounted at the back of the pool.
THE POST PRODUCTION
As per usual I imported the images into Lightroom 3, and made my colour correction and white balance adjustments. I then used a collection to store a few of my favourites, this being one of them(above). So I then exported this image to Photoshop CS5 for some further adjustments.
I used some advanced frequency seperation techniques that I’ve customised to clean up the skin which took very little work on Jacinta. She has beautiful skin with hardly any imperfections. I added the tinest bit of light to her eyes and lips to make them pop. The key with the eyes is to be subtle about it. A little make a big difference. The eyes are one of the most common mistakes photographers make in retouching photos.
I dodged and burned the highlights/shadows respectively for extra contrast and then applied a very gentle colour gradient across the image from left to right to complement the colours from the speedlights in the photo. Red to turqoise. To finish it off I added some sharpening using a special technique with a mask. The mask allowed me to remove too much sharpening from places where I didnt want it such as the skin.
Fairly simple really, but done properly with a model like Jacinta and it turns out just superb!
Definitely more from this set soon!
B.
This 1977 Toyota Celica GT4 is deserving of so much respect no matter what your preference of car. Neil has spent more than half a dozen years building this car and there hasn’t been a single part of the car untouched. I don’t just mean the flashy paint job, the Work wheels and a nice engine swap to a Toyota 3SGTE, it’s all the little things and the attention to detail that really add up to complete the car.
It’s hard to find cars still being built like this these days.
Last time I checked with Neil this was pushing out 340hp at the wheels which is a very decent amount of horsies at your mercy.
Anyway you can read all about Neils’ car in the latest edition of Fast Fours Magazine. I had the pleasure of shooting this car late last year and now my efforts are published and on the news stands for you to enjoy. It’s in the January 2012 edition and I think you’ll find its a good month to buy because there are two back issues included! Pretty sweet deal.
To the left is what the cover looks like!
Now i’ll leave you with a few behind the scenes photos from the shoot.
This is one of my favourite composites that I did for one of my clients Top Shelf Entertainment. It was part of a series of images I had to do for the launch of their new website. Originally this photo wasn’t meant to be a composite, I was simply going to utilise the gritty concrete wall but after some further consideration we decided to turn these into some more creative and visually interesting composites!
Thanks to Photoshop, extracting someone off a background is fairly easy these days, but it still requires you to know what you’re doing and I’d definitely shoot it on a grey or plain background if I had the choice.
TAKING THE PHOTO:
So lets look at the lighting setup first. I had two big softboxes setup behind my subjects. They were 120 x 80cm sotboxes from a very old Visico studio kit I purchased years ago. being a location shooter I never invested any further in studio lights, I opted for battery powered packs instead. The lights these softboxes were attached to were also Visico, and were capable of about 400 WS each. These required power so I ran a couple extension leads to them from the kitchen of the warehouse we were at. Now these two softboxes were my rim lights and I used softboxes so the light would wrap around my subjects a bit better. They were sitting roughly on a 45 degree angle to my subject.
Up front as my main light I had my Elinchrom Ranger RX Speed AS with one Action head firing through my 100cm Elinchrom Deep Octa rotalux softbox. I had it positioned fairly high and angled downwards.
I chose the 100cm Deep Octabox over the larger Octaboxes because for male models I don’t want the light to be too soft. If the light source is too large and soft then it will fill in all the shadows around the subjects muscles and you will lose all that definition that you really need!
CREATING THE COMPOSITE IN PHOTOSHOP:
Unfortunately I don’t have time to go into all the details but I’ll run through the basics. I started off by using some various techniques to extract as much detail from the photo as I could and then proceeded to clean up the image such as a lot of the creases in the clothing and also fixing the shoes.
To place my ninjas on a different background, I didn’t actually cut my subjects out. I used a different approach. An approach where there is no need for any pen tools or selections or anything like that. How did you put them on a different background I hear you ask? Well I actually used a much different technique which works really well but only if you take the photo correctly. I originally learnt the technique off a friend of mine, German photoshop guru Calvin Hollywood. The technique makes use of the blending modes offered to us in photoshop, more specifically the overlay blend mode. If you can shoot your subjects on a 50% grey background or at least as close as you can get to that, you can use this technique.
In photoshop, place your NEW background on a layer, above your original photo with your subject. Then simply set the blending mode of this top layer to overlay. Yep, that’s it. So easy! So all the grey areas in your original photo will now be replaced by the new background image, at least it will look that way. The best part about this technique is that it retains the shadows created by your subjects in the original photo. If you look at my final ninja image, the shadows from the two ninjas were from the original photo! Once you perfect this technique it saves so much time. Obviously it isn’t a solution all the time. In this particular instance it didn’t work perfectly. I never intended to use this technique so we didn’t have a nice grey background, it was a very textured light grey background. So once I applied this technique in photoshop, I still have to create a mask and just mask out a few bits of the new background so it didn’t block my ninjas at all. Still much easier than having to cut them out.
Once that was all done I added some subtle colour to enhance the image. I applied a yellow to blue gradient across the image to establish each ninjas territory and help emphasise how they are clashing together. Finally some dodge and burning and some sharpening and it’s pretty much done.
Thats all for now…
Brodie.
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You’ve seen it in the magazine (havent you?! If not see the latest Perth Street Car Magazine here) and now it’s time to see it on your computer screens. Danny Williamsons 750Hp 2JZ Powered Nissan S15 Drift Car certainly earns its place on the racetrack, and the astonishing Kristal Hammond certainly deserves our attention. Check out the behind the scenes video below to learn a little bit more about this car and see both myself and Kristal hard at work! As an extra treat I have a bunch of behind the scenes photos for you too.
(WATCH IN HD 720p!!)
Publication: Perth Street Car Magazine (http://www.perthstreetcar.com) Jan 2012 Issue
Photographer: Brodie Butler ( http://www.brodiebutler.com )
Assistants: Ross Metcalf, Brett Wilkinson, Danny Williamson
Videographers: Ross Metcalf
Car: Danny Williamson’s Nissan S15 750Hp Drift Car
Model: Kristal Hammond
Make-Up Artist: Meagan Clarke
Video shot on 7D
Photos taken on 5DMKII
Music: I Am A Fighter Composed by Pete Calandra & Scott P. Schreer
PERTH STREET CAR:
Twitter: www.twitter.com/perthstreetcar
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Perth-Street-Car-Magazine/119479901417967
BRODIE BUTLER PHOTOGRAPHY:
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/brodiebutler31
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/brodiebutlerphotography
Check out a few more of the photos from this feature below and please drop me a comment to let em know what you think!
Mark Wallace has become pretty renowned for his educational video series on youtube on behalf on Adorama and this time he bring us a little video on working with models. It’s a basic guide from start to finish on working with a model from a photographers point of view. It certainly doesn’t cover all the angles but it’s always interesting to see how others conduct themselves through the whole process.
Check it out.
Thanks to a tip-off from Jay Wells I stumbled across this the other day and had a bit of a laugh! This is a huge photographic industry secret being given away here, guaranteed to produce amazing results everytime. Have a look….
Here’s a car I love. Danny Williamsons 750 horsepower Nissan S15 Silvia drift car that I photographed for the latest Perth Street Car Magazine out on news stands now!
Featured alongside this car is the very talented and amazing Kristal Hammond. I’ll have plenty more photos and behind the scenes on the car and Kristal very soon!
Also in this issue from Perth Street Car:
“Another massive 264 page edition full of tough cars and top tech. In this issue we have 19 of WA’s toughest cars from early Fords and Holdens right through to the latest Falcons and Commodores, an 2000hp Pro Street Maloo, Dave William’s stunning Gold’53 Chev, Eddy Tassone’s immaculate 8-second VZ GTO, an 8-second VL Commodore, Brent Locatori’s razor sharp XD and a host of other super-clean and supercharged cars.
We also have coverage of Powercruise, Narrogin Revheads, the All Ford Day and the WA side of Gazzanats Adelaide.
Well here we are, at the end of 2011 and what an exciting year it has been!
I was lucky enough to have started my aerial photography this year, and from my first trip up in the air I managed to nail the front cover of Aviator Magazine Australia with a shot of Darius Pavry’s 300L acrobatic plane in their February 2011 issue. That was certainly exciting. While I was up there I also took a few happy snaps of our beautiful coastline which you can see in this post: Perth Aerial Photography from a Helicopter. You might also want to check out the little behind the scenes video of it all here: Behind The Scenes In a Helicopter with Perth Photographer Brodie Butler. I couldn’t resist to use that music.
It’s been another successful year with Perth Street Car Magazine too for me. This year the magazine took an interest in my behind the scenes videos and we began officially shooting the videos for each issue, starting with this great video of Tims BLOONES Ute and Miss Motorvation winner Gemma Louise. Unfortunately since I am the photographer for the car & model features I can’t film which is highly frustrating. So I have had to put my assistants to work and bring fellow video shooters on board to help out. Big thanks to all of you; Liam Underwood, Kieran Herald, Elliott Vassila, Ralf Schubert, Luke Brooks, Peter Clarke and Ross Metcalf. You can see the rest of my behind the scenes videos on my youtube channel. (Latest Issue out now with Danny Williamsons 750HP S15 drift car and Australian beauty Kristal Hammond)
Photo By Ian Greenwell
Well I never thought Id say this but I officially became a Director of Photography in the filmmaking game this year. In 2010 I started getting heavily involved with HDSLR cameras and pushed my way forward into the industry and in 2011 I really managed to make a dent, working on a number of projects and even creating some productions of my own. It’s an exciting time and I look forward to what 2012 brings. My favourite thing was probably something I filmed with Elliot Vassila and actually X Factor star Johnny Ruffo. We set out one Saturday for a few hours of filming and put together a very cool little action film, just to try out some special effects. Check it out here: Point Blank, A short action film with special effects. I also posted about my first official DOP experience with plenty of behind the scenes here: Becoming a Director of Photography PART TWO
My website and blog copped a fair bit of traffic around two particular occassions this year. It was the rise of Sam Schoers and Renae Wauhop when they hit our T.V screens on the amazing race. Renae of course being the Miss Universe Australia Runner up for 2011. I have photographed and known both these girls for quite some time so having previously featured them on the blog, caught the eye of all the internet searches from fans. See more here: Sam and Renae to race around the World on Channel 7
The second and largest traffic spike was of course from Johnny Ruffo, the X Factor Grand Finalist. I had actually been working with Johnny for a long time on his first music video production which unfortunately had to be sidelined due to X Factor commitments. We did some great photos together though which have made their way all over the internet and I look forward to working with him again. Check out Johnny’s photos here: A day with local Perth singer Johnny Ruffo
Only 1 workshop this year! Well I have to say I’m very sorry to all those people that have been emailing me begging for another one. Finding time for the workshops is difficult. I still cant promise there will be one soon, but I can promise you that I am always thinking about where I can fit another one in. Stay Tuned!
Certainly one of the most memorable moments for me was when a good friend of mine, Director A.J. Carter was hired to direct a piece featuring our childhood heroes James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger! While I unfortunately wasn’t there I did manage to get the whole scoop on the project and I must say provided a bit of technical help because the project was shot on the Canon 5DMKII which ofcourse is what I spend most of my time filming with! I spent a bit of time with the Director of Photography Guy Livneh and of course A.J. and put together an official behind the scenes post with all the technical bits and peices and with some photos courtesy of Rafael A Leyva. The resulting video went viral straight away and was a huge success, and the blog post I wrote went viral amongst the HDSLR filmmaking community which was good. Check out the exciting project right here: Filming James Cameron & Arnold Schwarzenegger with the Canon 5DMKII
Lastly, to wrap up this quick little reminiscing session, Its been another exciting year working with Top Shelf Entertainment. This year Top Shelf launched an amazing brand new website and I had a bucketload of photography and post production to do to fill the website. It was exciting for me because I got to explore my photoshop composite abilities a bit more and be a little more creative. Let me share a few photos with you to finish off the year…
There will be more of these released on the blog soon!
Finally I just want to send out a huge Thank You to my team and others that have been pretty influential in my photography/filmmaking this year.
First thanks goes out to Karl Pearce. An excellent shooter himself and an extremely helpful, thoughtful and very professional assistant.
Also to Jay Wells for the consistent motivation, inspiration and ideas. For the shoulder rubs, the witty remarks and for bringing me cider when its needed most. Thanks Jay you’ve been a tremendous help.
A new addition to the team that Id like to thank is Elliott Vassilla. I have been joining forces with Elliott on some film projects this year but he has also taken an interest in assisting me on photoshoots throughout the year too so thanks very much buddy I cant wait for the next project. I even made a n effort to spell your name right for once!
Thanks to Saul, Howard, Ash, Sam and the rest of the team from Camera Electronic for another supportive year and for also jumping on board a film as a sponsor and providing gear. If there’s anything you need call these guys.
A big thanks also to my fellow video shooters who contributed this year; Ross Wallace, Luke Brooks, Peter Clarke,Kieren Herrald
And finally a thank you goes out to Perth Film Network founder Debbie Thoy for believing in me and giving me an extra kick start in the film industry through a number of exciting projects.
I’m so worried about forgetting to mention someone, If I have forgotten you I’m really sorry and its my round, and maybe work harder next year so I remember. haha!
See you lot next year!
B.
Here is a little sneak peek at the behind the scenes of the 2012 Sxymma Calendar photoshoot! What’s Sxymma you ask? Only the hottest calendar you can get your mittens on for 2012!
Check out the 2012 SXYMMA Calendar HERE.
Footage was filmed by Elliott Vasilla and Luke Brooks. Thanks Gents! Also a thanks to Camera Electronic for letting us try out their new Cobra Crane.
More from the calendar soon, until then check out www.sxymma.com
The 2012 Sxymma calendar is creating waves among the MMA community all over the country. Why wouldn’t it? MMA is one of the fastest growing sports taking over the world, and we threw in some of the worlds finest ladies from our very own Perth into the mix. Now I rekon thats a pretty good mix to sell calendars.
Fightmag.net has jumped on board to support the calendar too, and they have started by throwing us on the front cover. Karra Scrimgeour, one of our Sxymma models has had her profile shot featured which you can see above.
So anyway the calendar are still for sale on EverythingMMA here.
Here’s the original image they created the cover from, which has popped up on the blog before:
